Tag Archives: Iran

Former president and 11 others face charges they helped Iranians hide role in 1994 terror attack on Jewish center that killed 85

Former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner will face trial on charges she covered up the role of Iranians in a 1994 terrorist bombing at a Jewish center in Argentina’s capital, judicial authorities announced Monday.

Eleven other former officials and people close to Kirchner’s government will also be tried on charges of cover-up and abuse of power, Federal Judge Claudio Bonadio said in a ruling released by Argentina’s official CIJ Judicial Information Center.

The trial date has not been set.

So far, four of the accused have been detained. In December, Bonadio asked lawmakers to remove Kirchner’s immunity from prosecution, which she gained last year when she was sworn in as a senator. Legislators have not acted on the request. The immunity protects her from being arrested, but she can still be tried.

Kirchner, who was president in 2007-2015, denies any wrongdoing or involvement in any cover-up involving Argentina’s worst terror attack. The 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association center in Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded hundreds. Iran denies any involvement.

The judge backed an assertion against Kirchner made on January 14, 2015, by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who was investigating the case. Nisman said the 2013 agreement that Kirchner’s government made with Iran in exchange for favorable deals on oil and other goods ensured that Iranian officials involved in the attack would escape prosecution.

Nisman was found dead in his apartment with a bullet wound in his right temple four days later. His case remains unsolved. But last year, an investigation by Argentina’s border police agency concluded that Nisman was murdered, contradicting earlier official findings that Nisman likely killed himself.

(Thousands of Argentinians protest on February 18, 2015 in Buenos Aires, with signs demanding “Truth and Justice,” on the one-month anniversary of the murder of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman. Nisman was murdered by unknown assailants one day before he was officially to present allegations of treason against then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. )

If efforts to expose Iran’s and Hezbollah’s roles in the Argentinean bombings are successful, the information will elucidate for regional leaders the dark side of Iran’s ties to sub-state terrorist groups to increase even further its influence in Latin America.

For decades, Iran has seemingly been employing both normative diplomatic ties and criminal links to export its Islamic revolution to the Western Hemisphere. By using similar methods of subversion, Iran appears already to have penetrated other Latin American nations, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and some island countries in the Caribbean.

Iran’s activities in Latin America are a direct challenge to U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere. Iran, it seems, wants to replace the U.S. as the power ally of Latin American countries.

While Iran’s nuclear, ballistic missile, and expansionist policies in the Middle East are well known, most of the Islamic Republic’s operations in Latin America appear to have been proceeding underway, below the radar, for several decades.

…

Declassified Argentine intelligence reports also clearly show that Hezbollah had carried out a previous bombing, in 1992, of the Israeli Embassy — an attack in which 29 were killed and around 200 wounded.

Last month marked the third anniversary of the murder of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who claimed to have evidence that would expose the role Argentina’s former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in obscuring Iran’s alleged responsibility for the attack. Nisman had been leading an investigation into both Iran’s potential role in the AMIA bombing and its possible cover-up by Kirchner.

Initially, Nisman’s death seemed to doom any chance that those who had committed this act of terror would ever be prosecuted. Argentinian protestors, however, questioned initial reports that he had committed suicide and demandedthat his death be investigated.

Attorney Mohammad Najafi has been held in detention in the Iranian city of Arak since January 15, and is facing eight charges for exposing the death of a young man who died in police custody after being arrested during the recent protests in Iran.

Najafi’s own attorney has also been threatened with arrest, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has learned.

“The Iranian authorities should immediately release Najafi and end the practice of intimidating and persecuting lawyers for exposing human rights violations inside the country,” said CHRI’s Executive Director Hadi Ghaemi.

“There’s no justice in a system where lawyers are put in jail for doing their jobs,” he added.

Najafi was due to be released on February 14 but the month-long detention order against him was extended, according to his lawyer, Payam Derafshan.

An Anti-Terrorism court in Gilgit has sent the President of Gilgit-Baltistan Supreme Appellate Court Bar Association, Advocate Ehsan Ali, for judicial remand until February 26 for a facebook post he had made.

The detention comes after an FIR was registered against the progressive human rights lawyer for sharing ‘derogatory content’ on social networking website Facebook.

The content in question had been a photograph related to the anti-government protests in Iran, along with an explanatory note, describing the rationale behind him sharing the post. Advocate Ehsan had come under fire immediately afterwards, as he was accused of sectarian hate speech and inciting violence between the different religious communities of the area.

Since then, the prominent lawyer has removed the content, and has apologised to the people who found the post derogatory, and whose sentiments were hurt. He later met prominent clerics in the region to explain his position and seek forgiveness.

Internet streaming giant Netflix has reportedly begun production in Buenos Aires on a documentary miniseries probing the January 2015 murder of Alberto Nisman – the federal prosecutor who spent more than a decade investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the Argentine capital, and then later exposed the role of former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her colleagues in a cover-up of Iran’s responsibility for the atrocity.

Reports in the Argentine press on Monday said that Catalan production company JWP had been commissioned by Netflix to produce the series. Founded by the British documentary film director Justin Webster, the company has produced award-winning documentaries on Spain and Latin America, including a film about the celebrated Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and another on the Basque terrorist group ETA.

Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment on January 18, 2015, hours before he was due to deliver a complaint to the Argentine Congress that charged Kirchner, former Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, and several key aides and cabinet officials with having negotiated a pact with Iran that involved the cancelation of six “Red Notices” — international arrest warrants issued by global law enforcement agency Interpol — for the Iranian officials wanted in connection with the AMIA bombing. The pact was voided by Argentina’s Supreme Court following Kirchner’s electoral defeat by current President Mauricio Macri in November 2015.

While the Kirchner government’s initial efforts to portray Nisman’s murder as a suicide have been completely discredited by official forensic analysis of the crime scene, the exact reason behind his murder and the identity of his killers is yet to be revealed. According to Argentine news outlet Diario 26, the producers of the Netflix series are hoping to obtain interviews with Kirchner herself; Nisman’s former assistant Diego Lagomarsino, who was indicted in December 2017 as an accomplice to the murder; and with a number of the key officials who claimed that Nisman took his own life.

Often described as the “86th victim” of the AMIA bombing, Nisman took over the case in 2005 after the previous corrupted investigation into the attack collapsed. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more wounded after a truck packed with explosives drove into the AMIA building in downtown Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994 in what remains the worst terrorist attack on Latin American soil.

A third suspicious death in Iranian prisons since early January 2018 underscores the need for an immediate independent inquiry, Human Rights Watch said today. On February 10, the family of a well-known Iranian environmentalist, Dr. Kavous Seyed Emami, who had been in detention for two weeks on bogus charges, reported that he had died under unknown circumstances.

On January 24 and 25, security forces reportedly arrested seven environmental activists on January 24 and 25, including Seyed Emami, a well-known Iranian-Canadian academic and a faculty member of Imam Sadegh University. On February 10, Ramin Seyed Emami, his son, wrote on social media that authorities had summoned his mother the day before to inform her that her husband had “committed suicide” in detention.

“Iranian judicial authorities think they can get away with claiming that Seyed Emami, a well-known professor, simply committed suicide while being detained in one of the highest-security wards of Evin prison,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The Iranian judiciary long ago lost its credibility after failing to investigate repeated incidents of torture and mistreatment in detention.”

…

The authorities claimed, in reporting the other two deaths, that Sina Ghanbari committed suicide in Ervin prison and Vahid Heidari in Arak prison. However, the government has failed to conduct an independent inquiry into their deaths and has harassed lawyers working on Heidari’s case. On January 15, authorities arrested Mohammad Najafi, a human rights lawyer from Arak who was following Heidari’s case and detained him for several weeks.

Monday 29 January marked the 1000th day Iranian lawyer Narges Mohammadi spent in detention in Iran.

A prominent human rights defender, Mohammadi was sentenced twice for her human rights activities and is in the midst of serving a sentence amounting to a total of 16 years for what human rights group Amnesty International describes as trumped up charges.

Mohammadi’s situation is however not atypical for human rights defenders in the Islamic Republic. As Amnesty International’s Researcher for Iran Raha Bahreini told The Iranian, it is representative of the way in which the country treats those who campaign for the improvement of the human rights situation within it. In particular, her case is part of a wider crackdown against those campaigning to end the death penalty in Iran.

…

Also notable is the conviction of Abdolfattah Soltani, a founder of the Centre for Human Rights Defenders. He is serving a 13-year prison sentence, also in Evin prison and again in part for his peaceful activism against the death penalty in Iran.